The present invention disclosed herein relates to a method of recommending stickers during a dialogue through a social network service or an instant messenger, and more particularly, to a method of recommending stickers that are appropriate for a context through a dialogue act analysis.
Emoticons are being used to express the emotional state of a user during a dialogue through a social network service or an instant messenger.
In the past, emoticons (e.g., OTL, TT, ^^, etc.) written with texts was added to the end of the dialogue, but in recent years, emoticons of graphic image types are being widely used.
While inputting dialogue contents, a user opens an emoticon selection window and then selects and inputs an appropriate emoticon. In order to more conveniently perform the foregoing process, a technology of automatically converting and expressing a text inputted by a user into an emoticon has been also developed.
FIG. 1 is a view illustrating an emoticon displayed on a well-known personal computer messenger (NateOn).
In the well-known messenger shown in FIG. 1, when a specific keyword is inputted, the corresponding text is automatically converted into an emoticon corresponding to the specific keyword. In FIG. 1, when a user inputs a word “present”, it can be seen that the word “present” is automatically converted into the emotion corresponding to the present.
However, when a specific keyword is simply inputted, this related art technology merely expresses an emoticon matched with the specific keyword in advance. Accordingly, in many cases, emoticons are expressed in regardless of dialogue contents or contexts and emotional state, even in an inappropriate manner in the light of the dialogue situation.
Accordingly, there has been developed a technology of recommending a more appropriate emoticon in consideration of a situation such as the emotional state of a user, surpassing the emoticon conversion technology through simply keyword matching.
Korean Patent Application Publication No. 10-2011-0026218 discloses “apparatus and method for inputting text message and its program stored in recording medium”, which extract words indicating the emotional state from dialogue contents that are inputted, and select an emoticon matching with the emotional state using the extracted words.
However, this technology is also merely to select emoticons matching with the corresponding keywords from emoticons by analyzing inputted texts when keywords representing the emotional state such as happiness and sadness show. For example, in case where words indicating the emotional state of a user are ironically used unlike the dictionary definition of the word, there is a limitation in that unexpected emoticons are still recommended.
Meanwhile, the Korean Sound Conference Paper, Vol. 28, No. 1, PP 61-69 (2009), entitled “A Method for Measuring Inter-Utterance Similarity Considering Various Linguistic Features”, discloses a technology of measuring similarity in consideration of not only simple semantic analysis of utterance, but also morphological features and semantic features (e.g., sentence pattern, tense and affirmation/negation).
The paper which is an existing research of the applicant of the present invention can be utilized to recommend appropriate emoticons through semantic analysis about utterance, but there is a limitation in that the context according to the flow of dialogue cannot be understood. Hereinafter, the term “utterance” refers to at least one of text and image.